Sincerity vs. Complexity: from Visible to Invisible Problems

Americans and Europeans are realizing their propagandists include teachers, lawyers, and judges, while real estate tycoons are prioritized over individual citizens. Battles between conservatives and liberals used to be race-based and therefore subject to law and media; now, property ownership is the deciding factor, and the need for stable insurance favors conservatism. Ironically, the larger the property owner, the fewer taxes it pays, because real estate tycoons and religious organizations know how to game politics through tax credits, bankruptcies, and other legal loopholes.

"I understand it, the tax code, better than anybody that’s run for president." -- Donald Trump (2016)

Meanwhile, the average homeowner doesn't realize his or her house is dependent on the Federal Reserve, a massive international bond market, and the mortgage interest tax deduction; the average teacher doesn't understand the link between pension ROIs and Wall Street; and the average churchgoer doesn't understand the church's work and tax exemption would be unnecessary if local government was more competent.

“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” -- James Carville

What we have here is a failure to educate, and a system so complex, it requires a law degree and litigation experience to understand. Simply put, most wealth in America comes from tax credits, tax avoidance, or tax deductions, which insurance companies, banks, and real estate developers--and more recently, technology companies--are experts at manipulating. In our current economic state, the honest individual taxpayer doesn't matter, and President Trump's goal to onshore investments means more U.S.-based jobs but also more targeted tax credits (carrot), sanctions (sticks), and complexity. Any would-be reformer in 2028¹ will require an army of forensic accountants, and at best, will propose another AMT or other anti-loophole mechanism that won't touch the underlying tax benefit.

Why should you care, particularly if you don't own a home or earn less than the median annual salary? Because your entire life as an American is determined by rules designed by lawyers working with insurance companies. You don't have freedom--you have clearly defined lines you live in, and most of those lines protect real property and debt within a closed loop of aligned countries. Don't believe me? Go to your local grocery store. Try to find Iranian Medjool dates, Javanese tamarind, Farm Fresh Cafe Latte, Brownes Dairy yogurt, Cuban cola, or Russian Baikal.  

Only one American product in my shopping bag in Malaysia.
Almost all USA products were 35 to 40% more expensive than other brands.

Own a car? Try driving it without wearing a seatbelt.² Want the truth about JFK? It depends on what the president decides to declassify. Need a life-saving antibiotic without a doctor's prescription? Too bad you're not in SE Asia, where you can walk into any small pharmacy and get anything you'd like as long as you have cash, including India-manufactured drugs deemed unsafe in the EU. And don't even think about exercising your freedom of assembly and speech by joining a pro-Palestinian student protest or speaking out in favor of Palestinians. Even if you're a member of Congress, you can be censured and denied committee appointments and influence.

"We have been brought up to believe that the American political system works beautifully, it is democratic, Congress represents us, the president is elected, he represents us, [but it] doesn't work that way. Democracy depends on people speaking out and in times of great crisis, on people creating a commotion." -- Howard Zinn

Why don't you have more choices? Because your quality of life as an American depends on convincing foreign countries to accept your technological (and then legal) standards, then USD-denominated debt. To accomplish this feat, work is sent around the table of allies to ensure some basis for economic partnerships. This is called globalization. As China rises, aided by access to Russian and Iranian energy, developing countries can now find cheaper ways to develop, thus limiting Pax Americana. What happens when empires are limited? They first spread wealth and their way of life in the form of debt to maintain the status quo, but soon inflation--and the bond market--complain, and more land and people must be gained for expansion. Today, that expansion has destroyed America's moral credibility in the form of Palestine and its strategic credibility in the form of a Zelensky-led Ukraine. 

“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?” -- Howard Zinn, WWII veteran 

Multi-national corporations and large banks are uniquely situated to prosper in such conflicts because their "ideals" require tangible and measurable outputs, which impose concrete limits. In contrast, modern governments, which failed to corral technology companies, are convinced they can use algorithms³ to hide their flaws, abuses, and incompetence, which has created a backlash so severe, unreasonableness no longer has limits. Adidas and Volkswagen are still here today; the National Socialists are not.⁴

Allow me a lesson. Remember the popular clique in class? We outsiders tolerated them because they were physically more attractive, had the best cars, and looked like they had more money. What if one day we saw another group of people with similar cars, similar makeup, and similar clothes who were nicer? 

"We campaigned as Outies and [outsiders] rallied all of those who weren't with the in crowd and wanted a say... I won with more votes than all the other candidates combined. It was a powerful lesson—there are a lot more Outies than Innies, and together that means power." -- David Suzuki ("My Happy Childhood in Racist British Columbia")

Extrapolate into the future, and you soon realize the popular teenagers depend on de facto monopolies. Before long, the popular kids would bad-mouth the competing group, steal their ideas, ban or blockade their favorite products, and call affiliated police officers for assistance. Under such intense scrutiny, most competing groups fold. I have been in SE Asia for several years. China's influence is growing, not declining. China is not going to fold. It is now up to Western Europe, Norway, and Australia to promote Western values.

Good luck. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (May 2025)

1. No rising star in the Democratic Party is a tax expert. They're non-tax lawyers. I am also a lawyer, but I've been doing my own taxes since seventeen (most likely overpaying), and my favorite law school class was Tax Law taught by the brilliant Jeffrey H. Kahn. I think I earned a B- (just above the minimum passing grade) but it was my most useful class. Interestingly, I also under-performed academically in my most useful undergraduate class--"Introduction to Symbolic Logic," taught by a philosophy professor resembling both an Irish elf and Hollywood villain.

2. Think I'm being facetious? In Thailand, so few people obey the seatbelt law instituted in 2022, many rideshare drivers have plugged up their seatbelt catchers to bypass the "beeping" sound. Fun fact: the word Thai comes from "Tai," meaning free, but according to Professor Xie Yuan Zhang, the original meaning of “Tai” might have been “person” or "native inhabitant."  

3. Westerners don't realize politics has become a game where manipulating algorithms and images is the primary tactic, and politicians are mere stand-ins for technological efficacy. A German citizen today might realize his government once hid concentration camps far away from his grandfather's house in order to reduce visibility, but cannot contemplate his government using lawyers and legislators to hide or de-rank unfavorable online information. Americans have been more fortunate in a sense because of heavy-handed COVID19 regulations, which later revealed back-channel censorship. In America, when a legislator or executive is unreasonable, Americans can no longer assume ill intent because we know we do not have all the facts. In Germany, most citizens never see police beating pro-Palestinian protestors, including older Muslim women, or judges fining, barring, or jailing pro-Palestinian commentators and is shocked when an impressionable Muslim teenager commits terrorism in misguided tribal defense. I can imagine a world where mainstream media shows all violent crimes committed daily by Germans, and statistically speaking, know the religion of the perpetrators would not be Muslim, even on a per capita ranking; yet, the average German cannot realistically imagine such a world--his or her mental safety depends on a specific set of assumptions, including reasonable police officers, competent judges, and grateful immigrants. 

4. From David Suzuki (2020): "I began my career in television. My belief was that what people need is information. The more information they have, the better decisions they will make. I never dreamed that today in a cellphone, you would have access to more information than people have ever had in human history. You can access the Library of Congress on your cellphone. And yet people churn through the Internet until they find something that validates what they already believe. You want to believe climate change is a hoax? There are dozens of websites that say that. So now the problem is we are overwhelmed with information. People just cherry-pick that information to deliberately reinforce what they already believe."

Bonus: "One of the terrible dilemmas of democracy is that only under conditions of duress or crisis do those cherished rights even matter, but that's when they are often rescinded in the name of national security. What good are high ideals if we guarantee them only when times are good?"